[MUD-Dev] NEWS: Oblivion RPG's (next version of Morrowind) NPC AI

[John Arras]

On Sat, 23 Oct 2004, Mike Rozak wrote:

<from the referenced article>

> Rather than following pre-scripted paths, every NPC is given a set
> of general goals they'd like to achieve, but the details of
> fulfilling that goal is entirely up to them. If a citizen is
> hungry, they'll look for a way to get food. They might buy food,
> hunt it, or steal it, then find a place to sit to eat and so
> on. This means that every one of the game's 1,000 NPCs follows a
> full 24/7 schedule that continues whether or not the player is
> there to witness it. It also means that the NPCs react to each
> other, so a townsperson who decides to steal a loaf of bread in
> full view of the guards may find himself under arrest.

<snip>

> In fact, one of the interesting problems that the team has had to
> face came about precisely because the AI is so good. According to
> Howard, the AI has caused guards to decide to eat and go hunting
> deer, only to get themselves arrested for attacking
> something. When they fight back against the arresting guard, the
> other guards see a fight and try to join in. In not too much time,
> every guard in the town was involved in the scuffle, which left
> the rest of the town open to thievery by other NPCs, resulting in
> empty stores. Much of the team's current effort is going into
> putting sensible governors on the AI's behavior to avoid
> situations like empty stores that would result in situations that
> wouldn't be fun for the player.

This system sounds really amazing. Of course, lots of press releases
about upcoming games talk about incredible AI systems that they will
have, but somehow those systems never make it into the game.

However, I think Bethesda has a good chance at succeeding at this,
because their description of the problem with guards killing each
other allowing villagers to loot the town can only happen if they've
solved a lot of the basic problems of creating such a system.

I've gotten very jaded when reading about games that will have some
'leet AI system in them, only to find out that they couldn't get it
done by ship time, so they fell back on canned scripts; or that it
never came close to doing the kinds of things that were mentioned in
early press releases. Or, in the case of online games, the AI
systems are really just more powerful building tools, and the world
was never truly dynamic. I realize it's difficult to make good AI,
so I am very pleased to hear that they're working on this so early
in the dev process, and that they've gotten far enough that the
problems aren't the initial problems of trying to get Something!,
Anything!, to work. But instead, they're working on tweaking,
extending, and balancing a working system.

John
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